The present invention relates to a document creation apparatus which is advantageously suited for creating and editing documents in which there coexist plural types or species of descriptive element data, such as text data, graph data, pattern data, image data and other data.
In recent years, the document creating apparatus exemplified by a word processor tends to be imposed with such a requirement that the apparatus should be capable of coping with various species of descriptive element data such as graph, pattern and the like data in addition to the text (character) data. Since these descriptive elements of different types are edited with data formats differing from one to another data, creation and editing of a document in which a plurality of different type data coexist mixedly are conducted in such a manner in which a page layout for the document to be created is first displayed, wherein fields containing data to be edited on the layout are subsequently designated and the descriptive elements for the designated field are created and edited while displaying the elements on an area separated from that for the page layout, as is disclosed in JP-A-61-18036.
The hitherto known apparatus is however disadvantageous in that editing for one field can not be performed in parallel with editing for other field and the layout of other pages can not be referred to in the course of editing for a field on a certain page. Accordingly, when edit processing should be started for one field in the course of edit processing for another field, the later processing must be terminated previously. When the layout of the other page is to be referred to, the edit processing to this end has to be executed. Upon returning to the editing for the original field, a similar procedure must be followed. For these reasons, the document creating apparatus of the prior art involves a very troublesome procedure and manipulation in creating and editing the documents.